On The 41st
Anniversary Of The Fall Of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)-Vietnam At The End- All
Honor To The Heroic Vietnamese Trotskyists
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Sometimes a picture is in fact
better than one thousand words. In this case the famous, or infamous depending
on one’s view, photograph of the last American “refugees” being evacuated by
helicopter from the American Embassy rooftop in Saigon (now, mercifully, Ho Chi
Minh City) tells more about that episode of American imperial hubris that most
books. That clinging mass of blurry figures dragging, fighting, pushing to get
that last out before the NVA swooped down in a flash and closed down the old
shop. Books that spent thousands of words talking about “domino theories, red
menaces, communist hegemony, and sticking it to the Soviets by a little proxy
war in far off rice fields.
Recently I reviewed Frank Snepp’s
book about Vietnam at the end of the war, Indecent
Interval , where I noted “as is the case with this little gem of a book,
ex- CIA man Frank Snepp’s insider account of that fall from the American side,
it is nice to have some serious analytical companionship to that photo
[helicopter rescues off the Embassy rooftop].
Moreover, a book that gives numerous details about what happened to who
in those last days in a little over five hundred pages. Naming names about who
the good guys and bad guys really were (from the American imperial
perspective). Especially now, as two or three later generations only see
Vietnam through the hoary eyes of old veterans, both military and radical
anti-war, from that period like me (a veteran in both senses) to tell the
tale.”
And such histories, memoirs and
remembrances help to get a fix on that Vietnam episode in the lives of many of
the young in that time. Sometimes though the story of war, about what happened
before the whole edifice came crashing down, can be told another way, in a more
personal way. Who knows in one hundred years the book below may present the
more important story.
**************
From the American Left History
archives, October 25, 2010:
Markin comment:
Earlier this month I started what I
anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist
Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place
documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the
James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the
introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions,
and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks
of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of
roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of
organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of
international linkage through various organizations from the First to the
Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the
Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots
are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist
Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its
socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The
World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various
formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon
Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the
SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines
were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
Today I am starting what I also
anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s
when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary
Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section
of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from
other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A
main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of
that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the
inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as
they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover
later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for
posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a
document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the
International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am
starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either
organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not,
and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political
views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and
I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense
Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and
committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor
Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense
work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of
all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
Markin comment on this series on
Vietnamese Trotskyism:
At the most fundamental level the
struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism as it evolved out of the
post-Bolshevik revolution Russian Communist Party inner-party disputes of the
mid-1920s can be encapsulated in the differences between Trotsky’s theory of
permanent revolution and Stalin’s theory of socialism in one country. In short,
this dispute within the ostensibly communist movement is the continuation of
the historic struggle in the international working class movement, and
particularly in its Marxist wing, between reform and revolution. As it turns
out this inner- party dispute that started out as a simple verification of
Trotsky’s theory, at first applied solely to Russia, that in the age of
imperialism the international bourgeoisie, and its national components,
including its colonial and semi-colonial dependents no longer could, or more to
the point, wanted to lead bourgeois revolutions, as exemplified by the French revolution
in the 18th century came to expressed a chasm between those, like Trotsky, who
favored extending the Russian revolution internationally and those, like
Stalin, who wanted the Communist International, and its national sections, to
merely act as agents of Soviet foreign policy.
Nowhere is the contrast between
those perspectives more clearly expressed than in the struggle for the
Vietnamese revolution that was central to the world-wide left-wing political
milieu in the 1960s when this writer came of political age. Many of us came to
defend the Vietnamese revolution first as an example of the right to national
self-determination for small countries oppressed by world imperialism. Some of
us moved on to defend that revolution because it was led by Stalinists, the
exemplars of two-stage revolution (first a separate democratic stage, and then
seemingly never, a socialist stage) and kowtowed to every move that “Uncle” Ho
(and his successors) publicized. And a few of us came to defend that revolution
despite its Stalinist leadership, understanding that a military victory against
American imperialism was critical for revolutionary strategy and that the
creation of a unitary workers state , albeit in distorted form as in North
Vietnam, was a historic accretion to the international working class movement.
World-wide in the 1920s and 1930s
for many reasons, great and small, personal and political, the struggle between
Stalinism and Trotskyism was almost totally to the disadvantage of the latter.
Vietnam, in the 1930s and 1940s, represented something of an exception. As the
documentation provided in this series of articles points out it took the
physical liquidation of the Vietnamese Trotskyism cadre (in its two competing
tendencies) to break important segments of the Vietnamese working class and its
allies from a Trotskyist perspective. Although, as the articles also point out,
mistakes of political omission and commission were made the fallen Vietnamese
comrades are worthy of honor in the history of revolutionary struggles. A truly
fitting tribute to their struggles awaits a victorious workers revolution. Remember
the Vietnamese Trotkyists! Remember Vietnamese Bolshevik martyr Ta Thu Thau!
*************
Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam
by John Sharpe
Written: 1973
Source: Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam, A Spartacist Pamphlet (Chapter I)
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007. You can freely copy,
display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet
Archive as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers
& editors above.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/vietnam/trotskyism.html
[Editors’ Note: This article is
little more than a sketch of the history of Vietnamese Trotskyism. Only a brief
account of the movement and sporadic issues of its newspapers are available to
us at this time. Nevertheless, the facts that are known serve to underline
doubly the historic importance of the struggle for the Marxist program of permanent
revolution, the struggle to resolve what Leon Trotsky referred to as the
“crisis of revolutionary leadership.” The price of Stalinist betrayals is
measured not only by their deliberate murder of hundreds of Trotskyist
militants in the aftermath of the September 1945 insurrection (which the latter
helped lead and the former helped defeat), but also by the subsequent deaths of
more than two million Vietnamese workers and peasants in their heroic battle
against French and U.S. imperialism. Most of these could have been avoided if
the Stalinists, and in the first instance Ho Chi Minh, had not been able to
sell out the struggle at crucial periods with their policies of appeasement of
the bourgeoisie.]
As was the case throughout the
world, the Trotskyist movement in Vietnam was forged in the struggle against
the errors and betrayals of the Stalinists. However, unlike most other areas,
the Vietnamese supporters of the Fourth International succeeded in achieving a
mass base during the late 1930’s. In fact, both of the competing groups
claiming to be Trotskyist were publishing daily newspapers before or just after
World War II.
Nevertheless, both groups, the
centrist La Lutte group led by Ta Thu Thau, and the more leftist International
Communist League (the October group) led by Ho Huu Thuong, were paralyzed by
French repression and ultimately decapitated by the Stalinists. These defeats
were in part the result of certain erroneous policies, notably a tendency
toward perpetual united fronts with the Stalinists and a failure to draw a
sharp line against popular fronts. We honor the memory of these martyrs and
their determined battle against French colonialism and against reformism in the
workers movement, but we must also learn from their mistakes.
Formation of the Indochinese
Communist Party
The history of the Vietnamese
Stalinist movement is inseparably bound up with the life of Nguyen Ai Quoc
(later known as Ho Chi Minh), its founder and principal leader.
He emerged as one of the leaders of
the Communist International in the Far East after his journey to Moscow in 1923
as the delegate of the French CP to the “Peasant International” and his
participation in the Fifth Congress of the Comintern, where he delivered a
report on the colonial question. An important factor in his development was the
fact that he became involved in the Comintern only after it had already begun
to degenerate seriously under the Stalin-Zinoviev leadership. The “Peasant
International,” for example, was one of Zinoviev’s more dubious maneuvers,
designed to seduce populist peasant leaders such as the Croatian Radič into
support for Russia. Not only was it a phantom organization from the beginning,
but it was necessarily based on Stalin’s policies of the “democratic
dictatorship of the peasantry and proletariat.” For Marxists, who seek to
organize the workers’ international, there could be no question of building a
peasants’ international, that is, of organizing another class.
Nguyen Ai Quoc also participated in
the “Intercolonial Union,” which included several left bourgeois nationalists
from the Middle East, hardly a model of communist organization. Thus it is not
surprising that when he reached Canton in 1925 as an associate of Borodin
(chief Comintern representative in China at the time) he set up not a communist
party, but instead a socialist-oriented nationalist grouping, the Vietnamese
Revolutionary Youth Association (Viet Nam Cach Menh Thanh Nien Hoi, or Thanh
Nien for short).
This was the kind of “Marxism” which
Nguyen Ai Quoc learned from Stalin, who at the time was instructing the Chinese
Communist Party to liquidate itself into Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, turning
over membership lists and even arms to these “anti-imperialists.” Shortly after
Stalin made him an honorary member of the Communist International, Chiang
turned on his Communist allies and butchered thousands of militant workers in
Shanghai in April 1927.
Despite this graphic object lesson
in the consequences of opportunist policies (as a result of which he had to
leave first Canton and then later Hankow also), Nguyen Ai Quoc refused to
learn. Thus for the first several years the Thanh Nien concentrated on
consummating a fusion (which never came off) with the strictly bourgeois
Revolutionary Party of New Vietnam (the Tan Viet). At the first congress of the
Thanh Nien in May 1929, his supporters on the presiding committee obstinately
opposed the formation of an explicitly communist party. A minority, small (3
out of 17 delegates) but influential (it was the entire delegation from the
interior), walked out of the congress and set up the Indochinese Communist
Party (Don Duong Cong San Dang), sharply condemning the Thanh Nien leadership
as petty-bourgeois nationalists.[1]
The new party experienced immediate
success, appearing to the masses as the more revolutionary of the two, so in
August the Thanh Nien switched gears and set up the Vietnamese Communist Party
(Annam Cong San Dang). This was in part the result of Stalin’s “left turn”
internationally (the so-called “Third Period”), as the Comintern had refused
membership to the Thanh Nien, called for the formation of a unified CP and
criticized the program of the Nguyen Ai Quoc faction. The unified party, also
called the Indochinese Communist Party, was formed in October 1930 and affiliated
to the Third International the following April.
The first Communist efforts were
directed at spearheading a desperate peasants’ revolt centering on central
Vietnam during 1930-31. In the Annamese provinces of Ha Tinh and Nghe-An the
ICP broke up the large estates and set up peasant “Soviets” on the order of the
border-region Soviets set up by Mao in southeastern China during the period
1927-29. Like the latter, however, they were brutally liquidated by the
government forces.
In contrast to its adventuristic
policies in the countryside, the CP tactics in the cities were restricted to
“democratic” demands and “peaceful” demonstrations, thus leaving the masses
unprepared for the bloody repression by the French colonial regime. Mercenary
soldiers machine-gunned the defenseless masses, as the Foreign Legion
terrorized the Annam peasant districts which had risen in revolt. The
repression cost the lives of some 10,000 workers and peasants, with another
50,000 deported to the prisons at Poulo Condor. In June 1931 the Central
Committee of the ICP was arrested in Saigon.
Formation of the Trotskyist Groups
It was in these circumstance that
the two principal groups claiming to support Trotskyism were formed, the Nhom
Thang Muoi (October) group and the La Lutte (Struggle) group. The International
Communist League, usually called the October group after the name of its
newspaper, Thang Muoi, was led by Ho Huu Thuong and founded in 1931. Due to the
fact that it was illegal to publish left newspapers in Vietnamese, this group
led a clandestine existence from 1931 to 1936 when the popular front led to a
slight liberalization. It went over to a weekly legal French paper, Le
Militant, in 1937, which, however, was prosecuted and then banned. They
reverted to a semi-legal paper before beginning publication of what was
probably the first daily Trotskyist paper in the world (Gerry Healy, please
note), the Tia Sang (Spark), in 1939. Due to its clandestine existence, its
more leftist positions and the fact that its material was published mainly in
Vietnamese, little is known about Ho Huu Thuong’s group. What is known is that
it opposed the united front between the Stalinists and the Thau group which
lasted from 1933 to 1937.
The other group was centered around
the person of Ta Thu Thau, a student returned from Paris who had been active in
the Left Opposition in France. Its leadership had been arrested in August 1932
during the White Terror and tried in May 1933. However, some of the comrades
were liberated in early 1933 and formed a united front with the Stalinists in
Saigon led by Tran Van Giau in order to present working-class candidates in the
May 1933 elections to the Saigon city council. Their official joint newspaper
was called La Lutte (Struggle).
The coalition had an enormous electoral
success. On the first ballot (of two rounds, as in France), the candidate of La
Lutte with the least votes still received more votes than the leading bourgeois
candidate. On the second ballot, two working-class candidates were elected, the
Stalinist Nguyen Van Tao and the Trotskyist Tran Van Trach. The coalition
continued its existence and joint newspaper until 1937. The united front was
limited to the legal activities, while the illegal organizations of both groups
operated separately.
It is unclear whether this united
front was simply a no-contest pact, or involved joint propaganda around a
lowest common denominator program [see Letter]. If it were the latter, this
would certainly represent an opportunist retreat from one of the basic
principles of Leninism, the need for the independent organization of the
vanguard. A common program obliterates the line between Bolshevism and
centrism. In any case, by its very nature, a joint newspaper and an ongoing
united front could only lead to political confusion in the minds of the masses
and the cadre themselves. Why was there a division between Trotskyists and
Stalinists if the two could work together for years, the workers would ask?
Moreover, for a period at the beginning of the French popular front, the Stalinists
monopolized the newspaper and thereby effectively suppressed the objections to
this class-collaboration by the Ta Thu Thau group.
The Thang Muoi group of Ho Huu
Thuong, however, was opposed to any collaboration with the Stalinists and
restricted itself to underground work in this period. To oppose limited joint
actions directed against the bourgeoisie and the colonial regime, for instance
common demonstrations or in certain circumstances a no-contest agreement in
elections, is to attempt to raise a Chinese wall between the revolutionaries
and the workers in reformist or centrist organizations and to weaken the
proletariat in its battle against the common class enemy. The united front
tactic is a permissible “compromise” where it is possible to draw a class line.
But things were quite different during the popular front.
The Popular Front
With the formation of the
Radical-Socialist-Communist popular front in 1935, the Stalinists made a sharp
turn to the right, forming their own Indochinese popular front. They allied
themselves not only with the Vietnamese section of the SFIO (Socialists), but
with bourgeois nationalists such as Nguyen Pham Long and Bui Quang Chien, whom
the joint Stalinist-Trotskyist La Lutte had bitterly denounced a few years
earlier. Not content to form an alliance with the “progressive” comprador
bourgeoisie, the ICP went even further and, according to the Stalinist
historian Le Thanh Khoi, “broadened” the popular front to include monarchist
parties![2]
Under Stalinist editorship, La Lutte
greeted the appointment of the socialist Maurius Moutet as Colonial Minister of
the popular front Blum government. A few short weeks after this welcome, Moutet
telegraphed officials in Saigon (September 1936): “You will maintain public
order by all legitimate and legal means, even by the prosecution of those who
attempt to make trouble if this should prove necessary.... French order must
reign in Indochina as elsewhere.”[3] The Stalinist members of the Saigon city
council went so far as to actually vote for military special taxes for “French
national defense”![4] Clearly, such taxes could only be used directly against
the Vietnamese peasants and workers, as indeed they were soon afterwards.
As the French historian Devillers
put it, “in these conditions the break with the Trotskyists became inevitable.”
By allowing Tran Van Giau and the Stalinists control of the paper, the Ta Thu
Thau group was able to continue the united front through the April 1937
elections, in which one Trotskyist (Thau) and two Stalinists (Nguyen Van Tao
and Duong Bach Mai) were elected to Saigon city council on the joint ticket.
But in June 1937, the Trotskyists
around Thau took editorial control of La Lutte, which assumed a distinctly
different posture, fomenting strikes and mass protests, along with Le Militant,
the legal paper of the Ho Huu Thuong group.
Thau launched the new line with an
editorial entitled “The Popular Front of Treason,” which got him two years in
jail as a reward from the authorities.[5]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
—from “Action Program,” LA LUTTE,
No. 213, 14 April 1939
1. Fight against war preparations,
break the blockade which is strangling the Chinese revolution and favoring
Japanese imperialism through mass action, through boycotting Japanese
merchandise.
2. For direct action to force
promulgation of social legislation in Indochina: a 40-hour law, collective
bargaining, control over hiring and firing, sliding scale of wages.
3. Against the fascists, form action
committees in factories, the civil service and the army to throw out fascist
personnel and have them fired.
4. Against the Stalinists who preach
“voluntary” submission! Popularize the slogan: “Unconditional National
Independence.”
5. Build real alliances of workers,
peasants and the middle classes in action committees, in factories, in
neighborhoods, among peasants and soldiers to prepare for the workers and
peasants government, to expropriate the capitalists and feudalists and to
assure the well-being, peace and freedom for all workers—in factories, offices,
fields, commerce and the army.
Down with the Fascists, Capitalists
and Feudalists!
Down with the Stalinist Leaders,
Lackeys of Imperialism!
Long Live a May 1st Dedicated to
Class Struggle!
Long Live the Fourth International!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
During this time the Stalinists were
concentrating their efforts on building an alliance with bourgeois
constitutionalists, the “lndochinese Congress.” Breaking out of the limited
electoral campaigns (the eligible voters included only about 40,000 or roughly
1% of the adult population), the Trotskyists. in contrast, utilized the limited
freedoms introduced by the Blum government to push mass agitation in strike
movements, campaigns against the repression and in favor of the right to unionization,
the bête noir of the colonialists. The Trotskyists also set up “action
committees” of labor and peasant organizations, as did the Stalinists. Due to
their success, especially in the Saigon area, these committees were rapidly
banned and brutally repressed by the French governor. In the rural areas, La
Lutte initiated agitation around the demand of “Land to the Poor Peasants,” a
clear class program as opposed to the “broad national union” being pushed by
the Stalinists.
In the 1939 elections to the Colonial
Council of Cochin China, the La Lutte group capitalized on this agitational
work and managed to win a resounding victory, with more than 80% of the votes
going to their candidates. The masses, faced with the choice between support
for French colonialism by the Stalinists and a credible Trotskyist opposition
fighting on a working-class program, overwhelmingly chose the latter. In
consequence, shortly thereafter, the Indochinese Communist Party in Cochin
China (southern Vietnam) split, the official party being headed by Duong Bach
Mai and the dissidents regrouping around Nguyen Van Tao.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
from Ho Chi Minh, “The Party’s Line
in the Period of the Democratic Front,” July 1939
1. For the time being, the Party
cannot put forth too high a demand (national independence, parliament, etc.).
To do so is to enter the Japanese fascists’ scheme. It should only claim for
democratic rights....
2. To reach this goal, the Party
must strive to organize a broad Democratic National Front. This Front does not
embrace only Indochinese people but also progressive French residing in
Indochina, not only toiling people but also the national bourgeoisie.
3. The Party must assume a wise,
flexible attitude with the bourgeoisie, strive to draw it into the Front, win
over the elements that can be won over and neutralize those which can be
neutralized. We must by all means avoid leaving them outside the Front, lest
they should fall into the hands of the enemy of the revolution and increase the
strength of the reactionaries.
4. There cannot be any alliance with
or any concession to the Trotskyite group. We must do everything possible to
lay bare their faces as henchmen of the fascists and annihilate them
politically....
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The polemics between the two
competing groups supporting the Fourth International became increasingly sharp
during this period. The Ta Thu Thau group, the official section of the FI,
accused the Ho Huu Thuong group of “inventing” its opposition to the united
front with the Stalinists years after it was first formed, which is almost
certainly not true [see Corrections]. However, Thau also condemned them for
advocating a joint La Lutte and Stalinist ticket in the 1939 elections. At a
time when the ICP was openly backing French imperialism and participating in a
popular front (the Indochinese Congress), support for their ticket, however
critical, was certainly a serious error. These were the same “communists” who
were voting for “defense taxes” in the Saigon municipal council while the
government was using the money to ship in tanks for use against Vietnamese
workers and peasants.
On the other hand, while the Thang
Muoi group did not score the electoral successes of La Lutte, it did manage to
bring out its newspaper for some years in Vietnamese before the latter
attempted this step and managed to put out a daily newspaper (Tia Sang, or
Spark) during 1939.
While both groups made important
errors during this period, and La Lutte appears to have had an overall moderate
approach of a centrist character, both vigorously opposed French colonialism
and stood sharply contrasted to the Stalinists during the crucial period. Their
attraction of a mass base is a tribute to the Trotskyist politics of permanent
revolution, even in a muted form.
However, the bourgeoisie regained
the upper hand and from October 1939 to January 1940 managed to wipe out the
entire legal organizations of both the Communist Party and the Trotskyists. The
ICP survived this repression better than did the Trotskyist groups, partly
because the latter were more of an immediate threat to the French in the south,
partly because the CP cadre were able to retreat to China where (after a period
in Kuomintang jails) they eventually received Chinese and U.S. aid and partly
because the Stalinists had begun retreating to clandestinity as early as 1938.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saigon Insurrection 1945
—from Workers Vanguard No. 20, 11
May 1973
Immediately following World War II,
the Stalinist and Trotskyist groups in Vietnam faced the crucial test of a
revolutionary situation. The working masses rose up against the occupying
imperialist powers (France, Japan and Britain), and at the same time against
the landlords and the native bourgeoisie. While the Stalinists, led by Ho Chi
Minh, succeeded in betraying and crushing the revolutionary upsurge, they were
not able to prevent the Trotskyists of the International Communist League (ICL)
from playing a heroic role during the few short weeks between their liberation
from French prisons and the brutal repression of the Saigon insurrection of
September 1945.
Against these Bolshevik-Leninists Ho
Chi Minh resorted to the ultimate tactic of Stalinists everywhere: assassination.
From Leon Trotsky, to the entire remaining Bolshevik Central Committee of 1917,
to the thousands of Russian Left Oppositionists in the Siberian labor camps, to
the heroic Spanish, French, German and Czech Trotskyists, to the Vietnamese
supporters of the Fourth International (the ICL and the Struggle group),
Stalinism carried out its murderous work. The Stalinist parasites came close to
destroying the living continuity of the Marxist movement internationally, but
they could not tarnish the revolutionary program of the Fourth International.
The Viet Minh in World War II
The dismissal of the French popular
front government in 1938 rapidly led to the banning of the CP in France. As a
consequence, beginning in September 1939 the French colonial government
outlawed all socialist groups in Vietnam, throwing hundreds of supporters of
the Fourth International into prison. Both the Struggle (La Lutte) group and
the International Communist League were broken up by the ferocious repression.
While many members of the Stalinist
Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) were also imprisoned, Ho Chi Minh and his
central committee were able to obtain refuge in Kuomintang China. This was no
accident, as the Stalinists supported the Allies in World War II (as did Chiang
Kai-shek) and were willing to make an alliance with the Kuomintang against the
Japanese. The Trotskyists, in contrast, took the Bolshevik position of
revolutionary defeatism during the war, refusing to support any of the rival
imperialist camps and their puppets. [see Corrections]
Beginning in September 1940,
Japanese troops occupied Indochina, while the pro-Petain colonial government
remained in place. The occupation was met in the south by a large-scale peasant
uprising in the Mytho region, an uprising led by Stalinist and Trotskyist
forces, in November 1940. This and other abortive revolts were brutally put
down by the French Foreign Legion, with more than a thousand arrests. (The
Indochinese CP subsequently condemned the uprising as premature and in typical
Stalinist fashion executed two of the leaders and expelled others.)[6]
In May 1941, the ICP called a
congress in southern China to found the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh (League for
the Independence of Vietnam, or Viet Minh for short). The program of the Viet Minh
was that of a typical popular front, saying nothing of socialism, limiting
itself to “democratic” demands, such as national independence and allying
itself with the Allies against Japan and the pro-Petain French colonial
government. Its main demands for the exploited peasants, for instance, were
reduction of rents and prohibition of forced labor and usury, with no more than
a vague mention of agrarian reform.[7]
Disintegration of the
Franco-Japanese Regime
On 9 March 1945 the Japanese, under
tremendous military pressure in the Pacific, moved to tighten their control
over Vietnam by ousting the fictitious French colonial government and disarming
and interning the French troops. As a consequence of this move, however,
bourgeois order began to deteriorate, allowing left wing groups to expand their
activities clandestinely. The Viet Minh, which under Ho’s instructions had
avoided military operations up to now, established a guerrilla base along the
Chinese border in the north.
Meanwhile, the Trotskyists had begun
to regroup. The International Communist League was reconstituted in Saigon in
August 1944 with only several dozen members. However, among these were five
founders of the Vietnamese Trotskyist movement, each having at least 12 years’
experience of revolutionary struggle, and several experienced cadre formerly
from the Hanoi section. After the March 1945 Japanese takeover, the ICL issued
a manifesto calling for preparation for the imminent revolution:
“The capitalists and feudalists who
today serve the Japanese general staff will also serve the Allied imperialist
states. The petty bourgeois nationalists with their adventurist policies will
also be unable to lead the people to a revolutionary victory. Only the working
class fighting independently under the banner of the Fourth International, can
accomplish the tasks of the vanguard of the revolution.
“The Stalinists of the Third
International have already abandoned the working class in order to capitulate
miserably before the ‘democratic’ imperialists. They have betrayed the peasants
by no longer talking about the agrarian question. If they are marching today
with the foreign capitalists, they will also aid the domestic exploiting
classes to crush the revolutionary people in the coming hours.
“Workers and peasants! Assemble
under the banner of the party of the Fourth International!”
—Manifesto of the ICL, 24 March 1945
In the meantime, the petty-bourgeois
independence parties and the quasi-political religious sects were floundering
without direction. The Cao Dai sect (a peasant grouping with a mystical
Christian-Buddhist-Confucian ideology) had supported the French during the
1930’s and then the Japanese during the war. Now, however, the leadership
continued to support Japan while the ranks were openly revolting. The Hoa Hao,
whose poor peasant and proletarian members were aroused by the prospect of
independence, were forced to oppose the French. The Vietnamese Kuomintang, the
VNQDD, while barely existing as an organized movement, had retained some
support among the petty bourgeoisie because of its unsuccessful uprising in
1930 and also opposed the re-establishment of French rule.
While such bourgeois nationalist
groups may oppose one or another foreign imperialist, they are not opposed to
imperialism as a system, and therefore they must oppose the struggle of the
working masses for their liberation from capitalist exploitation. It will
sometimes be necessary for workers’ organizations to enter into limited,
essentially technical or military agreements with a section of the bourgeoisie
for joint action in a particular struggle, but it is a betrayal of Marxism to
form a strategic alliance or long-term bloc with any bourgeois formation.
However, in spite of their claim to
support the program of the Fourth International, the centrist Struggle (La
Lutte) group formed just such a bloc, founding the “National United Front”
together with the VNQDD, the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao! This
“Trotskyist”-bourgeois-feudal popular front effectively erased the class line
separating exploiter and exploited. With its “democratic” program limited to
national independence it was impossible to distinguish from the Viet Minh!
The August Days
On 16 August 1945 the news of the
defeat of Japan reached Indochina. The following day the Japanese general staff
declared the countries of Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) independent.
The rapidity of the surrender surprised everyone. The Viet Minh, however, had
already convened a congress which the same day formed a People’s National
Liberation Committee as a provisional government. Everywhere they moved rapidly
to fill the governmental void, simply taking over the apparatus of the former
Franco-Japanese colonial regime. Viet Minh troops rapidly occupied Hanoi
without opposition from the Japanese. Seeking to avoid any appearance of
revolution, the Viet Minh asked for and received the abdication of Bao Dai, the
traditional emperor, who was henceforth “Supreme Political Advisor” of the new
government. [See Letter]
In a significant gesture, Ho drafted
(together with U.S. advisors) a Declaration of Independence, which begins by
quoting the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of
the Rights of Man, two of the key documents of the bourgeois revolution.
According to the Stalinist theory of revolution in stages, to call for
socialism at this point would have been “premature,” as the defeat of the
feudalists and imperialists was the immediate task. The reality of this
“theory” was revealed by Ho’s appeal to the French a month earlier for
independence within the French Union in “not less than 5 and not more than 10
years,” and by the agreement signed in Hanoi in early 1946 which permitted the
reintroduction of French troops!
In the South, events moved at a
somewhat different pace due to the relative weakness of the Stalinists. On 19
August the workers of the Ban Co district of Saigon formed the first People’s
Committee of the South. The following day a similar committee in the Phu Nhuan
district, the largest workers’ district of Saigon, took over governmental
power. In the countryside the peasants rose up at the same time, burning villas
of the large landowners, as well as several rice mills, in Sadec province on 19
August. In the province of Long Xuyen alone more than 200 government officials
and police were killed by peasants in the first days after the Japanese
surrender.
On 21 August the National United
Front called an independence demonstration which attracted more than 300,000
participants. The Hoa Hao and Cao Dai marched behind the monarchist flag with a
delegation of 100,000. The Trotskyists of the International Communist League
represented the other main pole of attraction in the march. Behind a huge
banner of the Fourth International came a series of placards and banners with
the ICL’s main slogans: “Down with Imperialism! Long Live World Revolution!
Long Live the Workers and Peasants Front! People’s Committees Everywhere!
Toward the Popular Assembly! Long Live the Arming of the People! Land to the
Peasants! Nationalization of the Factories under Workers Control! Toward the
Workers and Peasants Government!” As the banner of the Fourth International
appeared, hundreds and thousands of workers who had never forgotten the
revolutionary movement of the 1930’s flocked behind it, embracing old friends,
fighting over who would have the honor of carrying this or that placard,
saluting each other with clenched fists. In a matter of a few hours the
contingent of the ICL grew to 30,000. The Cao Dai and Hoa Hao peasants, against
the discipline of their leaders, applauded the banner of the Fourth
International each time it passed and listened attentively to the Trotskyist
orators’ agitational speeches on the national and peasant questions.[8]
The Viet Minh Coup d’Etat
Faced with the growing mass upsurge,
the Stalinist leadership of the Viet Minh began to move quickly to take power.
Their primary tactic was to present themselves as the legitimate
representatives of the victorious allies. Thus, in a Viet Minh proclamation on
23 August, Tran Van Giau, the top southern Stalinist, proclaimed: “We have
fought for five years alongside the democratic allies....” The previous
evening, Giau had issued an ultimatum to a meeting of the National United Front
calling on it to dissolve itself and turn over its administrative posts to the
Viet Minh. The next day the NUF disbanded and joined the Viet Minh. (As a
crowning touch to the betrayals of the Struggle group, which had set up the NUF
as a “Trotskyist” popular front, they were accorded a seat on the “Southern Committee”
of the Viet Minh on 10 September 1945!)[9]
The ICL was hardly inactive during
this period, setting up a printing shop, issuing bulletins to the population
every three hours and forming military units as a step toward arming the
workers.
But the Stalinists moved faster. At
5 a.m. on 25 August the Viet Minh carried out a bloodless coup, occupying the
city hall and police stations. Behind the backs of the masses, and with the
participation of the bourgeois nationalists (Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, VNQDD), the
Stalinists simply took over the existing state machinery and installed a new
bonapartist bourgeois regime. Later that day the Viet Minh called a mammoth
demonstration with more than one million participants. More than 30 political
associations were present, but the outstanding forces were grouped behind the
Stalinists and the ICL. With the break-up of the Japanese administration, the
police itself divided into two sections, the majority supporting the Viet Minh,
but a minority marching behind the banner of the Fourth International! The ICL
delegation was noticeably smaller (only 2,000 marchers) than in the previous
demonstration but this time many ICL supporters were marching with their trade
union contingents.
By this time the difference between
the Trotskyists and Stalinists was posed with razor sharpness. Two days after
the coup, Nguyen Van Tao, now Minister for the Interior of the Viet Minh
regime, issued a menacing challenge to the ICL: “Whoever encourages the
peasants to take over the landed properties will be severely and pitilessly
punished.... We have not yet carried out a communist revolution, which would
bring a solution to the agrarian problem. This government is only a democratic
[!] government, and therefore it cannot undertake this task. I repeat, our
government is a democratic and bourgeois government, even though the Communists
are in power.”[10] One could hardly ask for more clarity!
Military Support to the Viet Minh
Faced with this bonapartist
bourgeois government, the Trotskyists of the International Communist League
correctly adopted the position of an anti-imperialist united front. While
Stalinists and ex-Trotskyist revisionists (such as the Bolivian POR) have used
this slogan as an excuse for forming a political bloc with bourgeois nationalists,
the ICL had the Leninist policy of political independence of the workers
movement from the bourgeois regime, but military support against the
imperialist (British-Japanese-French) forces. While the Stalinists called for
“All Power to the Viet Minh,” the Trotskyists called for “All Power to the
People’s Committees.”
Following Tao’s press conference,
the Viet Minh cranked up an incessant anti-Trotskyist campaign in its press,
accusing the supporters of the Fourth International of sowing disorder. On 1
September Tran Van Giau declared: “Those who incite the people to arm
themselves will be considered saboteurs and provocateurs, enemies of national
independence. Our democratic liberties will be granted and guaranteed by the
democratic allies.”
While Ho Chi Minh was reading the
Declaration of Independence in Hanoi, the southern Viet Minh organized a
demonstration on 2 September to greet the British troops which were to arrive
imminently. Late in the afternoon more than 400,000 persons joined in a peaceful
demonstration proceeding to the Cathedral. As a priest known as sympathetic to
the Vietnamese was speaking from the steps of the Cathedral, shots rang out and
he was killed. The crowd ran for cover, but more than 150 were wounded in the
shooting which followed. The situation developed into a generalized riot, with
attacks on French colons suspected of responsibility for the criminal attacks
on the demonstration. A number of French were arrested, but then immediately
released the next day by the Stalinist police chief Duong Bach Mai, who issued
a statement “deploring” the “excesses.”
In response to the events of 2
September the Stalinists and Trotskyists issued two clearly counterposed
appeals. As the British troops under General Gracey were expected to arrive any
day, the Viet Minh proclaimed:
“In the interests of our country, we
call on everyone to have confidence in us and not let themselves be led astray
by people who betray our country. It is only in this spirit that we can
facilitate our relations with the Allied representatives.”
—leaflet of 7 September 1945
In contrast the ICL declared:
“We, internationalist communists,
have no illusions that the Viet Minh government will be capable, with its class
collaborationist policies, of fighting successfully against the imperialist
invasions in the coming hours. However, if it declares itself ready to defend
national independence and to safeguard the people’s liberties, we will not
hesitate to aid it and to support it with all technical means in the
revolutionary struggles. But in return we must repeat that we will strictly
observe the absolute independence of our party with respect to the government
and all the political parties, because the very existence of a party calling
itself Bolshevik-Leninist depends entirely on this political independence.”
—communiqué of 4 September 1945
The People’s Committees
Under the influence of the ICL,
during the three weeks after 16 August more than 150 “People’s Committees” (To
Chuc Uy Banh Hanh Dong) were set up in the Nam Bo (southern Vietnam),
approximately 100 of them in the Saigon-Cholon region. A Provisional Central
Committee composed of 9 members (later expanded to 15) was constituted after
the 21 August demonstration.
The question of the historical role
of these “people’s committees” is of paramount importance to revolutionary
Trotskyists. In the Quatrième Internationale article cited earlier, “Lucien” (a
Vietnamese leader of the ICL) writes: “The ICL led the revolutionary masses
through the intermediary of the People’s Committees. Despite its numerical
weakness, the ICL achieved, for the first time in the history of the
Indochinese revolution the grandiose historic task of creating the People’s
Committee or Soviet.”[11]
The ICL and the People’s Committees
did consistently call for political opposition to the bourgeoisie. Thus the
People’s Committees gave no political support to the bourgeois Viet Minh
government, while calling for a military bloc against the invading Allies
(which the Viet Minh naturally rejected, since its policy was to greet the
Allies). The ICL called for the arming of the working masses and took practical
steps to carry this out. The ICL slogans called not for a “democratic”
revolution limited to national independence, but also for expropriation of
industry under workers control.
Nevertheless, the very term
“People’s” Committee obscures the need for the independent mobilization of the
proletariat as a separate class. While an alliance with the peasantry and
sections of the urban petty bourgeoisie against imperialism and semi-feudal
landowners is a burning necessity, this alliance must be based first of all on
the independent organization of the working class. In predominantly peasant
countries, indiscriminate mobilization of the “people” guarantees the
domination of the unstable petty bourgeoisie over the working class. The
necessary alliance of workers and peasants Soviets must destroy the bourgeois
state and replace it with a workers state.
These general considerations had an
immediate practical consequence. While the People’s Committees refused the
ultimatums of the Viet Minh to subordinate themselves to the bonapartist
regime, the class difference between the two powers was not always clear to the
masses. The People’s Committees, especially in Saigon, were essentially organs
of workers power, while the Southern Committee government of the Viet Minh was
a popular front regime based on the existing bourgeois state. But to the masses
this appeared simply as the difference between two “people’s governments,” one
dominated by the Stalinists, the other by Trotskyists. Between these two state
powers a violent clash was inevitable but by calling for People’s Committees
the Trotskyists of the ICL failed to adequately prepare the masses politically
for the impending battle.
Massacre of the Trotskyists
The inevitable clash soon took form.
On 7 September Giau issued a decree ordering the disarming of all
non-governmental organizations. All weapons were to be turned over to the Viet
Minh’s “Republican Guard.” This affected the religious sects but also the
“vanguard youth organizations” and factory-based self-defense groups led by the
Trotskyists. The most important such group was the workers militia jointly
organized by the workers of the Go Vap streetcar depot and the ICL. The militia
issued an appeal to the workers of Saigon-Cholon to arm themselves for the
struggle against the inevitable British-French invasion.
The British and Indian troops under
General Gracey arrived in Saigon on 10 September. Along the road from the
airport the Viet Minh had put up banners and slogans welcoming the Allies; at
city hall Allied flags were flying on both sides of the Viet Minh flag. The
Viet Minh “Southern Committee” sat inside doing its paper work, while the British
proceeded to eliminate its power in the city. Gracey, who only a few weeks
earlier had declared, “The question of the government of Indochina is
exclusively French,” banned the Vietnamese press, proclaimed martial law and
imposed a strict curfew. All demonstrations were forbidden as was the carrying
of any arms, including bamboo sticks.
On 12 September the People’s
Committees and the ICL issued a joint manifesto denouncing the policy of
treason of the Viet Minh government. Popular discontent was seething in the
workers’ districts. Faced with the likelihood of insurrection, the Viet Minh
moved to behead it. At 4 p.m. on 14 September Duong Bach Mai, Stalinist head of
the police, sent a detachment of Republican Guards to surround the local of the
People’s Council which was in session at the time. Incredibly, the Trotskyists
simply gave up to these butchers! In the words of the ICL account:
“We conducted ourselves as true
revolutionary militants. We let ourselves be arrested without using violence
against the police, even though we were more numerous and all well armed. They
took our machine guns and automatic pistols. They sacked our office, breaking
furniture, ripping our flags, stealing the typewriters and burning all our
papers.”[12]
By this single act of cowardice, the
ICL leadership sealed its own doom and that of the first Vietnamese revolution.
Behind such a capitulation must have lain a serious misunderstanding of the
true nature of Stalinism. It is true that during the 1930’s the southern
leaders of the ICP were in a long-term bloc with the Struggle group, and showed
themselves to be somewhat more “leftist” than Ho. But this was only a tactical
adaptation to the presence of significant Trotskyist forces. In a similar
fashion the Bolivian CP agreed to form the Popular Assembly in 1971 along with
the “Trotskyist” POR, but only in order to better betray it. A proof that this
was only a temporary aberration is given by the Stalinists’ own criticism of
the southern party for its “leftist deviations... its underestimation of the
Trotskyist danger and its unprincipled cooperation with the Trotskyists”[13] in
the popular front period.
(Among the ICL leaders who were shot
as a result of the Stalinist coup were Lo Ngoc, member of the central committee
of the ICL; Nguyen Van Ky, ICL labor leader; and Nguyen Huong, young leader of
the workers militia, killed by the Stalinist police in July 1946.)
By 22 September the British had
sufficiently fortified their position to try an open test of strength. The
British took over the Saigon jail, while the French troops of the 11th Colonial
Infantry were armed. The French colons went wild later that day, arresting,
beating and killing innumerable Vietnamese. During the following night French
troops reoccupied several police stations, the post office, central bank and
town hall, all without armed resistance.
As the news reached the
working-class districts a spontaneous movement of resistance broke out. The
Viet Minh opposed “violence,” instead trying to obtain “negotiations” with
General Gracey. In the outlying suburbs trees were felled, cars and trucks
overturned and furniture piled up in the street creating crude barricades.
During this time the workers’ suburbs (Khanh Hoi, Cau Kho, Ban Co, Phu Nhuan,
Tan Dinh and Thi Nghe) were firmly in the insurgents’ hands. In some areas
French were shot indiscriminately in an outburst of racial hatred, the result
of 80 years of brutal colonial domination. In the center several important
factories and warehouses were burned down, and the port was under continuous
attack. Water and electricity were cut off completely and supplies were
precarious. The following day the Vietnamese insurgents openly paraded in the
main streets of the city center.
The most significant organized
contingent in the insurrection was the workers militia of the Go Vap streetcar
depot, a force of 60. The 400 workers of the company were well known for their
labor militancy. While affiliated to the Stalinist-dominated labor federation,
they refused to use the label of Cong Nhan Cuu Quoc (“Workers Saviors of the
Fatherland”), and refused to carry the Viet Minh flag (yellow star on a red
background), saying they would fight instead under the red flag of the workers.
The force was organized into shock groups of 11 members under elected leaders,
with the overall command headed by Tranh Dinh Minh. a young ICL leader and
novelist formerly from Hanoi.
(Faced with the joint opposition of
the Allies and the Viet Minh police, the Go Vap workers militia tried to open a
line of retreat to regroup in the Plaine des Joncs area. After several battles
with the French and Indian troops they reached the regroupment area, where they
established contact with the poor peasants. Already having lost 20 men, and on
13 January 1946 its leader Minh, in battle against the imperialist forces, the
militia was eventually overwhelmed, several of its members stabbed to death by
Viet Minh bands.)
In this revolutionary atmosphere the
Viet Minh Committee of the South issued its appeal: “there is only one answer—a
food blockade.” Futilely hoping to starve out the French (while British ships
controlled the port!), Giau concentrated on negotiations with the British. A
truce was announced on 1 October, but by 5 October General Leclerc and the
French expeditionary force arrived and rapidly moved to “restore order” and
“build a strong Indochina within the French Union.”[14] The truce was the best
present the beleaguered French and British troops could have received, an obscene
betrayal of the insurgent masses.
While the Viet Minh continued its
policy of appeasing the Allies, agreeing to allow free passage to British and
Japanese troops through rebel areas, the French and Indian troops launched a
general attack to the northeast, thus breaking the blockade of the city.
Instead of fighting back, the Stalinists concentrated their efforts on
eliminating the Trotskyists. Having eliminated the ICL and the People’s
Committee leadership on 14 September, they now moved on the Struggle (La Lutte)
group and, surrounding its headquarters in the Thu Duc area, they arrested the
entire group and interned them at Ben Suc. There they were all shot as French
troops approached. Among those thus murdered were Tran Van Thach (elected a
Saigon municipal councillor in the 1933 elections), Phan Van Hum, Nguyen Van So
and tens of other revolutionary militants. Shortly after this the Viet Minh
were forced out of Saigon.
Ho Sells Out to the French
In the North, Ho was following a
similar policy of capitulating to the Allies, in this case the Chinese and
French. However, the process took considerably longer than in the South, as the
first Chinese troops did not arrive until late September, giving the Viet Minh
time to consolidate its rule. Also, the Viet Minh had its own makeshift
guerrilla army in the North, and the Chinese were not actively opposed to an
independent Vietnam. In line with this policy of “broadening” the coalition to
include bourgeois nationalists and Catholic leaders. Ho in November ordered the
complete liquidation of the lndochinese Communist Party. The Central Committee
statement said that “in order to complete the Party’s task...a national union
conceived without distinction of class and parties is an indispensable factor”
and that this step was being taken to show that Communists “are always disposed
to put the interests of the country above that of classes, and to give up the
interests of the Party to serve those of the Vietnamese people” [our
emphasis]![15]
At this same time, however,
opposition was still strong in the North. The Struggle group at this time was
publishing a daily newspaper in Hanoi. Tranh Dau (Struggle), which had a
circulation of 30,000 in late 1945.[16] A letter to the International
Secretariat of the Fourth International in this period spoke of a
well-organized but persecuted organization of the Struggle group in the North.
Led by “Th...,” former leader of the Tonkin printers during 1937-38, it held
large meetings and published several books in addition to its daily newspaper.
One region where the line of the Struggle group had particular success was Bach
Mai. As a result of a large meeting there. Ho Chi Minh gave the order to arrest
Th... and other supporters of the Fourth International. (Th... was able to
escape from his Viet Minh captors and was fighting in the guerilla operations
in the countryside at the time.) Already a large number of Trotskyists had
perished in the resistance.[17] Eventually this group, too, was wiped out
entirely by the Stalinist repression.
At this time, Ta Thu Thau, the
leader of the Struggle group was in Hanoi, working on coordinating flood relief
and “conferring” with Ho Chi Minh. On his way south he was arrested on the
orders of the Viet Minh. Tried three times by local People’s Committees, he was
acquitted each time, a tribute to the Trotskyists’ reputation in Vietnam at
that time. Finally, he was simply shot in Quang Ngai in February 1946, on
orders from the southern Stalinist leader Tran Van Giau. Gullible souls have
questioned whether the wise Uncle Ho could ever have carried out such a vicious
act. Such doubts are an expression of political light-mindedness, as there is
no known account of Thau’s murder that even suggests that he was not killed by
Viet Minh forces, acting on orders. As for Ho, his only known statement on the
subject was made in a conversation with the French socialist Daniel Guérin:
“‘He [Thau] was a great patriot and
we mourn him.’ Ho Chi Minh told me with unfeigned emotion. But a moment later
he added in a steady voice. ‘All those who do not follow the line which I have
laid down will be broken.’”[18]
Having physically liquidated the
entire leadership of the Trotskyist movement in Vietnam. Ho was now ready to
conclude a “deal” with the French government (which included the Communist
François Billoux as minister of defense!). The preliminary convention between
France and the “Democratic Republic of Vietnam,” signed in Hanoi on 6 March,
provided among other things that “the Government of Vietnam declares itself
prepared to receive the French army amicably,” and for the stationing of 15,000
French troops north of the 16th parallel. The overall content of the accords
was for a limited independence, within the French Union. Defending this
despicable betrayal against revolutionary Trotskyist criticism, which lived on
in spite of the physical extermination of the Trotskyist cadres, Ho was forced
to call a mass rally in Hanoi the following day, during which he declared: “The
people who are not satisfied only understand total independence as a slogan, a
demand on a piece of paper or in the mouth. They do not see independence of the
country results from objective conditions....”[19] Primary among these
objective conditions, of course, was the fact that the French Communist Party and
Stalin were opposed to Vietnamese independence!
It was with the arrival of Allied
troops that the defeat of the first Vietnamese revolution was sealed. The
primary responsibility for this defeat lies clearly with Ho Chi Minh and the
Stalinists who consistently sabotaged the popular uprising and murdered its
leaders. Only by realizing the magnitude of this betrayal can one gauge the
significance of the capitulation of the Struggle group in joining the Viet
Minh, a move which led to its physical annihilation and to the generation-long
war against French and U.S. imperialism. While the International Communist
League demonstrated a similar underestimation of the lengths to which the
Stalinists would go to eliminate revolutionary opposition, its overall policies
in this period presented a clear Trotskyist opposition to the class
collaboration of the Viet Minh.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Socialism” in Half a Country
—from Workers Vanguard No. 21, 25
May 1973
After repeatedly capitulating before
the imperialist powers (Saigon, September 1945; the 6 March 1946 accords;
Fontainebleau modus vivendi), the Viet Minh were finally forced to fight the
French by a series of open provocations in late 1946. On 20 November, the
French navy, which had blockaded the Haiphong port, seized a Chinese junk
trying to run the blockade; in response, a Vietnamese shore battery shelled the
French. Seizing on this incident as an excuse, three days later the French
brutally attacked Haiphong with heavy artillery and aerial bombardment, killing
roughly 20,000 Vietnamese. Early in December, the French demanded that the
Vietnamese withdraw entirely from the city and the surrounding roads; in
response, the Vietnamese commander, Vo Nguyen Giap, proposed a mixed commission
to discuss the question! Subsequently, on 19 December the French demanded the
disarming of the Viet Minh militia, and that night general fighting broke out
in Hanoi. The fighting continues to this day. As it turned out, the Viet Minh
were quickly driven out of the capital and did not return until after the 1954
Geneva settlement. Had the Stalinists resisted the French reoccupation from the
beginning, when the imperialists were weakest, a quarter century of war and
more than two million deaths would have been avoided.
The attitude of the French Communist
Party in this conflict was an illustration of the lengths to which the
Stalinists would go in attempting to ingratiate themselves with their
respective bourgeoisies. Thus, while Ho Chi Minh was writing servile letters to
the Americans, forming political blocs with the pro-Chinese bourgeois
nationalists, dissolving the Indochinese Communist Party and agreeing to permit
the entry of French troops into the north, his French comrades were busy
explaining why the right of national self-determination did not apply to
Vietnam and voting war credits to finance the French expeditionary force!
As early as September 1945, the
Saigon committee of the French CP “warned [the Viet Minh] that any ‘premature
adventures’ in Annamite independence might ‘not be in line with Soviet
perspectives.’”[20] That same month the French government (including several CP
ministers) proposed a military budget of 193 billion francs, including 100
billion for the Expeditionary Force in Indochina; the CP voted for the
bill.[21] In July 1946, smelling a victory in the next elections, the
Communists took up a virulent nationalist stance: “Are we, after having lost
Syria and Lebanon yesterday, to lose Indochina tomorrow, North Africa the day
after?” wrote L’Humanité (24 July 1946).[22] Two days later the CP deputies
voted for a constitutional definition of the French Union which made Vietnamese
“independence” purely fictional!
But this obscene nationalism could
not stop at mere generalities: On 20 December 1946, a month after the French
bombardment of Haiphong, the CP voted in the French Assembly to send
congratulations to General Leclerc and the Expeditionary Corps. On 23 December,
three days after the outbreak of hostilities in Hanoi, the CP deputies voted a
special military budget made necessary “because of the resumption in
hostilities in Indochina.” As Vice-Premier in the government of Paul Ramadier
in March 1947, Maurice Thorez, head of the French CP, signed the order for
military action against the Vietnamese; at the same time, Ramadier stated that
“on the question of Indochina, we have always noted the correctness of the
government of the Soviet Union.”[23]
Some have alleged that because of
these nationalistic acts, the French CP during the late 1940’s was opposed to
the line of Ho Chi Minh in a fundamental sense, implying that Ho was
essentially a centrist, as against the reformist Thorez. That the differences
were essentially tactical is shown by Ho’s repeated efforts to enlist American
aid (at least eight letters to Truman in this period), his agreement to the
March 1946 accords and the Fontainebleau agreement and the extremely conservative
policies followed by the Viet Minh through most of the first Indochinese war.
Ho and Thorez were simply capitulating to different bourgeoisies; qualitatively
their policies were the same.
The Agrarian Question
As Leon Trotsky wrote in the
“Transitional Program”:
“The central task of the colonial
and semi-colonial countries is the agrarian revolution, i.e., liquidation of
feudal heritages, and national independence, i.e., the overthrow of the
imperialist yoke. Both tasks are closely linked with each other.”
From the very beginning, in 1941,
the Viet Minh took only the most minimal reformist position on the agrarian
question, favoring a 25 per cent reduction in rents. The Constitution of the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam written in 1946 stated flatly: “The rights of
property and possession of Vietnamese citizens are guaranteed.”[24] In the
period from 1945 to 1949 even this minimal program of rent reduction was only
applied to five per cent of the land belonging to large landlords, while eight
per cent (belonging to “unpatriotic” landowners) was redistributed—hardly a
radical land reform, much less an agrarian revolution.[25] However, beginning
with the agrarian decree of 12 April 1953, the picture changed as the
stipulations calling for reduction of rent, elimination of debts and
distribution of lands owned by colonists were put into effect by the local
peasant unions. At the same time, the membership of the peasant unions doubled
and the percentage of poor peasants in the Lao Dong [Workers] Party increased
from 37 per cent to 53 per cent. The French commander at Dien Bien Phu
commented that after the new agrarian legislation he wasn’t dealing “with the
same adversaries.”[26]
Yet even this change was merely
tactical. With the beginning of the Cold War with the enunciation of the Truman
Doctrine in 1947, the Soviet foreign policy had undergone a shift to the left,
embodied in the “Zhdanov line.” The victory of the Chinese CP in the civil war
with Chiang Kai-shek in 1949 meant that Ho was assured of supplies from the
deformed workers states. Thus, soon after, the Vietnamese Communist Party was
refounded as the Lao Dong [Workers] Party in 1951, and in 1953 the Viet Minh
decided to launch a militant land reform campaign. This pattern was virtually
identical to that followed by Mao in China, where even the simple democratic
demand for land reform was put off until the final break-off of negotiations
with Chiang in 1946! However, in both cases, the agrarian program which was
implemented in the final stages of the civil war in no way called into question
bourgeois property relations in the countryside. We have referred to Mao’s
policies in China as simply “reformism under the gun,” a label which certainly
applies with equal force to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam.
1954 Geneva Settlement
As Stalinists, the Viet Minh
leadership ultimately represented the interests of the bureaucratic clique
running the deformed workers states. At the first opportunity after a stalemate
was reached in the Korean War in 1953, the Russians began pressing for a peace
settlement in Vietnam as well. Ho soon took up the refrain even though the
Vietnamese were winning militarily. By the time the negotiations finally took
place in spring of 1954, the Viet Minh controlled roughly 85 percent of the country,
according to Western estimates, and had decisively defeated the French
expeditionary force at Dien Bien Phu. Commenting on the settlement, Douglas
Pike, a U.S. official associated with the CIA, has written:
“Ironically the agreement written at
Geneva benefitted all parties except the winners....
“Only the Viet Minh, the winners,
lost. Or were sold out. Ho Chi Minh somehow was persuaded—apparently by a joint
Sino-Soviet effort—to settle for half the country on the grounds that the other
half would be his as soon as elections were held....”[27]
The role of the Soviet Union in
pushing for this sellout “settlement” is well known. The equally pernicious
role of the more militant-talking Chinese was documented by the “Pentagon
Papers.” A key point in the negotiations came on 18 July 1954, when a Chinese
official transmitted a message to U.S. negotiators at Geneva. According to a
State Department cable:
“The informant said the Communists
are pressing for the stamp of American approval on the armistice agreement—already
okayed in principle by Britain and France—which would divide Vietnam between
Communist leader Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh and Bao Dai’s pro-Western regime....
“But the informant did not (repeat
not) rule out the chance of an Indochina cease-fire even if the U.S. refuses to
okay the armistice agreement.”[28]
As for Ho, despite rumors of secret
dissatisfaction with the cease-fire, and opposition to Moscow and Peking, this
is how he presented it to the Vietnamese people:
“At this conference, the struggle of
our delegation and the assistance given by the delegations of the Soviet Union
and China have ended in a great victory for us.”[29]
With victories like this, who needs
defeats!
The Viet Cong
The whole struggle for the
liberation of South Vietnam since the 1954 Geneva agreement reads like a replay
of the earlier war against the French. The names are changed, but the play is
the same. For six years Ho and the Hanoi leadership refused to organize a
revolutionary movement in the South, believing instead in the miraculous powers
of “peaceful coexistence.” Meanwhile, the butcher Diem was hunting down
southern resistance leaders, throwing peasants off their lands, murdering
thousands. Ho’s answer to this savagery summed up the position of the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) leadership quite nicely: “Our policy is:
to consolidate the North and to keep in mind the South.”[30]
As late as 1960, the DRV was still
trying to hold down the struggle in the South, arguing:
“The Northern people will never
neglect their task with regard to one half of their country which is not yet
liberated. But in the present conjuncture, when the possibility exists to
maintain a lasting peace in the world and create favorable conditions for the
world movement of socialist revolution and national independence to go forward,
we can and must guide and restrict within the South the solving of the
contradiction between imperialism and the colonies of our country.” [our
emphasis][31]
As in the first Indochinese war the
agrarian program and political perspective of the National Liberation Front are
clearly and precisely limited to “democratic” tasks. From the very beginning,
the NLF called for a coalition government:
“The present South Vietnamese regime
is a camouflaged colonial regime dominated by the Yankees.... Therefore, this
regime must be overthrown and a government of national and democratic union put
in its place composed of representatives of all social classes, of all
nationalities, of the various political parties, of all religions....
“Support the national bourgeoisie in
the reconstruction and development of crafts and industry.” [our emphasis][32]
The NLF has subsequently called for
protection of foreign investment and has never expropriated the French rubber
plantations; thus in good old Stalinist fashion it distinguishes between the
good and the bad imperialists.
As for the agrarian program, in the
words of NLF Chairman Nguyen Huu Tho:
“Our program reflects the broad
nature of the Front and the forces represented in it. We are in favor of land
to the peasants for instance, but not systematic confiscation; we are for
reduction of rents but for the maintenance of present property rights except in
the case of traitors. Landlords who have not supported the U.S. puppets have
nothing to fear.”[33]
The 1973 Paris Accords
Since April 1965, when Premier Pham
Van Dong set out the DRV position on peace negotiations (the “Four Points”),
the fundamental North Vietnamese demands have been for U.S. withdrawal and a
coalition government in Saigon. The coalition government is clearly intended to
be based on the existing state apparatus, which would make it a classical
popular front regime. If realized it could spell outright defeat for the
millions of Vietnamese who have fought for years with the NLF against U.S.
imperialism and the feudal-bourgeois reactionary regime in the South. By
preserving the property rights of “patriotic” landlords and the “national”
bourgeoisie, by guaranteeing foreign investors against expropriation, such a
regime would necessarily be unable to fulfill the fundamental aspirations of
the working masses.
The actual Paris accords of January
1973 do not set up such a government, nor do they call for regroupment of North
Vietnamese forces or disarmament. As a result, this “ceasefire in place” is not
simply a sellout, as the 1946 and 1954 agreements clearly were; on the other
hand, aside from the U.S. withdrawal, which itself could be reversed, it
settles nothing. There is no peace; the civil war goes on. In the meantime the
Stalinist leadership of the DRV/ NLF has essentially abandoned the civilian
political prisoners in the South, as it continues its fundamental strategy of
betrayal, the search for a bloc with the non-existent “good” bourgeoisie.
• No Support for the Robbers’ Peace—U.S.
Imperialism Out of S.E.Asia—Free All Political Prisoners in Saigon Government
Jails!
• Unconditional Military Defense of
the DRV—Political Revolution in Hanoi!
• Military Victory for the NLF—Viet
Cong Take Saigon—No Coalition Government!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Those Who Revile Our History
—from Workers Vanguard No. 21, 25
May 1973
Vietnam in 1945 was a typical colonial
country. The vast mass of the population was composed of poor peasants and
landless laborers, who suffered from exploitation at the hands of feudal and
bourgeois landowners, and from direct military oppression by various
imperialist powers (France, Japan, China, Britain and the U.S.). Yet, as shown
by centuries of unsuccessful peasant revolts, this heterogeneous popular mass
was unable to lead a victorious social revolution. In the early years of this
century the urban petty bourgeoisie threw up a series of nationalist sects
which, however, were equally unable to achieve the unity or social force
necessary to overthrow a developed colonial power. At the same time, the tiny
bourgeoisie never advanced beyond the most timid reform demands and, faced with
an awakened working class and peasantry, chose instead to cower behind the
protection of its French, and later U.S., masters.
Thus the lot of emancipator of the
oppressed Vietnamese masses fell to the young, small, but highly combative
proletariat. In contrast to India or even China, the bourgeois nationalists
were never more than a secondary (and at times minuscule) force in Vietnam
after 1930, while the political scene was dominated by the two major currents
of the workers movement, Trotskyism and Stalinism.
The Trotskyists stood on the
historic Marxist program of permanent revolution, insisting that because of the
combined feudal-capitalist character of Vietnamese society and the uneven
development of the various class forces, the “national” and “democratic” tasks
of the bourgeois revolution could be fulfilled only under the dictatorship of
the proletariat, supporting itself on the peasantry. This program was
represented in Vietnam by the International Communist League (ICL), which
called for complete national independence, land to the peasants,
nationalization of the factories under workers control and a workers and
peasants government. At the height of the Saigon insurrection of 1945 this
program was crystallized in the demand of all power to the People’s Committees.
While seeking to overthrow the bonapartist bourgeois Viet Minh regime in
Saigon, they called for a military united front against the invading
imperialist powers. Nevertheless, although at the high point of the uprising
the ICL led tens of thousands of workers, it was militarily overwhelmed by the
Stalinist Viet Minh, which brutally massacred hundreds of its militants, along
with leaders and members of the centrist Struggle group (also supporters of the
Fourth International) and various bourgeois nationalist leaders.
This heinous crime gave Ho Chi Minh
and the Stalinists unchallenged hegemony in the Vietnamese political scene.
However, despite this position they have consistently refused to mobilize the
working class for socialist revolution. When faced with imperialist armies,
their policies have amounted to a classic “bloc of four classes”—a purely
national revolution in coalition with the “patriotic” bourgeoisie (and, in this
case, the monarchy as well). In power, they have adhered to the policy of
“socialism in one country” (more precisely in half a country), first
sacrificing and then only reluctantly supporting their own comrades against
U.S. imperialism and its puppet regimes in South Vietnam.
These are the counterrevolutionary
policies of Stalinism, the political expression of a parasitic bureaucracy
which acts as the agent of the bourgeoisie in the workers movement; this is the
program of the “communist” Ho Chi Minh. It is also the program of his foreign
mentors, in the first instance Stalin himself and the French Communist Party,
but also of the more militant-posturing yet equally reformist Mao regime in
China. The sorry results of this strategy of betrayal have been three
successive robbers’ peace settlements, in 1946, 1954 and 1973, each of which
has left intact a bourgeois regime in Saigon.
Revolutionary Defensism
What attitude are proletarian
revolutionaries to take when faced with the actual struggles led by the
Stalinist leadership, these butchers of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, betrayers of
the peasants and workers, appeasers of French and U.S. imperialism—who,
however, also base themselves on and, in a limited and distorted manner, defend
the conquests of the working class? As Marxists we must begin with the
fundamental question—what is the class character of the states involved? The
Democratic Republic of Vietnam is a deformed workers state; that is, while it
has socialist property relations, political power is in the hands of a
parasitic bureaucracy rather than the working class. The struggle in South
Vietnam is essentially a civil war, pitting the working class and exploited
peasantry on the one hand against the local and foreign bourgeoisie on the
other. Fundamentally, the NLF-controlled areas in the South are deformed
workers states in embryo. Therefore, the only attitude that a party claiming to
represent the historic interests of the proletariat can take in a conflict
between the NLF/DRV and capitalist forces is one of revolutionary defensism.
Thus we unconditionally defend the NLF/DRV against the U.S. and the bourgeois
regime in Saigon, while at the same time calling for a political revolution to
overthrow the treacherous reformist leadership which is holding back the
struggle.
This was the approach taken by the
Vietnamese Internationalist Communist Group in France, which in 1947 declared:
“Our attitude vis-a-vis the Viet
Minh can best be defined by Lenin’s phrase ‘march separately, strike together.’
The Vietnamese internationalist communists are ready to join their blows
against imperialism with those of the Viet Minh, but they must maintain
complete programmatic independence and freedom of criticism, because in the
face of the past capitulations of the Viet Minh, placing confidence in its
policies would mean renouncing a revolutionary position.”[34]
Ho “Assimilates the Permanent
Revolution”
In their rush to capitulate to the
heroes of the petty-bourgeois radical milieu, the fake-Trotskyists of the
“United Secretariat” and the “International Committee” must gloss over the real
history of Stalinism in Vietnam.
The USec of Frank, Mandel and Hansen
is the direct descendent of the Pabloist International Secretariat, which in
the early 1950’s formulated the “theory” that the world was divided into two
camps, the imperialists and the Stalinists; because of the sharp character of
the impending conflicts, the Stalinists would be forced against their will to
defend the interests of the proletariat. Pablo’s conclusion: The Trotskyists
should dissolve their movement in favor of “deep entry” into the Stalinist
parties.
In the early 1960’s the U.S.
Socialist Workers Party came over to Pabloism with its theory that Fidel Castro
was an “unconscious Marxist” and thus the SWP’s function was to be merely a
cheering section for Castroism, recapitulating the European Pabloists’
capitulation to the Algerian nationalists. The common thread of Pabloism is the
belief that one or another non-proletarian force (the Stalinist bureaucracy,
students, peasant guerillas, etc.) will carry out the revolution, thereby rendering
superfluous or at least secondary the leading role of the Trotskyist party.
What this means in the case of
Vietnam can be seen from a recent book by Pierre Rousset, a leading member of
the French USec, on Le Parti Communiste Vietnamien. The book’s central thesis
is that:
“... the Vietnamese leadership as a
whole has assimilated the decisive implications of the permanent revolution for
colonial and semi-colonial countries.” [emphasis in original][35]
As we have shown, Ho Chi Minh’s
policies of vacillation and betrayal were in direct counterposition to
revolutionary Trotskyism and in fact required the massacre of thousands of
supporters of the Fourth International. How does this revisionist explain the
extermination of the Vietnamese Trotskyists?
“These assassinations, about which
historians of the Indochinese CP don’t speak, in their writings in French at
least, show at least two things: the width of the political gulf which then
separated the Trotskyist groups from the Indochinese CP [one would hope so!],
the former probably underestimating the importance of the national question in
the revolutionary mobilization of the masses, the latter profoundly
underestimating the social question in the colonial revolution, including at
the outset.”[36]
In short, for the Pabloists there is
not only no need to be a Trotskyist in Vietnam, since the North Vietnamese and
NLF leadership has absorbed the lessons of the permanent revolution; but in
addition, the ideological conflict between Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam
was entirely unnecessary, since there was a little bit of truth on both sides.
The murders? Just an unfortunate mistake.
Healy and “People’s War”
The position of the USec at least
has the virtue of reflecting a consistent long-standing policy: the open abandonment
of the Transitional Program and rejection of the essential lessons of
Trotskyism. It is noteworthy that the Socialist Labour League (Britain) and its
fake “International Committee,” which claim to be fighting Pabloism, and which
criticize sharply Hansen’s phrase about Castro being an “unconscious Marxist,”
take precisely the same position regarding the Vietnamese Stalinists as the
USec. In their obituary of Ho we read:
“There can be no doubt that he [Ho
Chi Minh] contained within himself and came to personify, all the
anti-imperialist hatred and fighting spirit of the colonial peoples....
“Like Mao Tse-tung, Ho instinctively
yearned to do battle with imperialism and the internal forces of reaction
within his native country.”[37]
Rather than an “unconscious Marxist”
(à la USec), we find here Ho Chi Minh the “instinctive” Marxist. A distinction
without a difference, if ever there was one! Elsewhere the Healyites
elaborated:
“It is indisputably true to say
that, on the basis of the Vietnamese experience, guns combined with the courage
and endurance of individual guerrilleros would have meant little or nothing if
Ho Chi Minh and other leaders were unable to analyse the principal and
secondary conditions within Vietnam as well as between Vietnam and imperialism
and on that basis outline a strategy for the conquest of power.”[38]
And just what was this strategy?
“It [Vietnam] demonstrates the
transcendental power and resilience of a protracted peoples war led and
organized by a party based on the working class and the poor peasantry and
inspired by the example of the October revolution [!].”[39]
And the Vietnamese Trotskyists,
murdered by these “instinctive” Marxists—what of them? Well, here it seems that
Ho was a little naughty, for which the SLL slaps his hand in reprobation:
“We do not forget these crimes
committed against our movement by Ho Chi Minh, any more than we seek to play
down his very real contribution to the struggle against world imperialism.”
But at the very moment that Ho
massacred the Trotskyists, he was according to the Healyites lined up against
world Stalinism itself!
“Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were
on one side of the barricades, Thorez, Stalin and French imperialism on the
other.”[40]
So you see, it is all here: The
unconscious (or instinctive) Marxism, the assimilation of the lessons of the
permanent revolution, the understanding attitude toward the murders of the
Vietnamese Trotskyists. And it is no isolated case. Healy’s famous “method”
also allows him to support the Red Guards, Mao Tse-tung, the “Arab Revolution”
and Indira Gandhi as supposed fighters against imperialism.
Although Healy uses “theory” and
“method” primarily as a smokescreen to hide his abandonment of fundamental
Marxist principles, there is in fact a method to the madness. The thread which
unites these various positions is the same objectivism which is implicit in
Pabloism: Since the sweep of the revolutionary wave (the objective forces) is
so all-embracing, the struggle for the program of permanent revolution, the
organization of the Trotskyist vanguard party, the struggle to rebuild the
Fourth International—all this is secondary and ultimately expendable.
SL and the Vietnamese Trotskyists
In contrast, the Spartacist League
continues to uphold the struggle and the memory of the Vietnamese Trotskyists,
while recognizing and seeking to learn from their mistakes. This is no
secondary or sentimental question. We have seen how the scandalous abandonment
of the theory of permanent revolution on the part of the IC and USec leads them
to solidarize themselves with the Stalinists against the Trotskyists in
Vietnam, going so far as to apologize for the murder of the latter. The
practical consequences of Pabloism are liquidation of the revolution and
annihilation of the revolutionaries.
The Spartacist League has
consistently, throughout its history, called for military defense of the
NLF/DRV, including in times or places where this has not been a popular demand.
We have demanded that Russia and China provide adequate military aid to the
Vietnamese. Alone of all the tendencies of the U.S. left we raise the question
of the war in our trade-union work, calling for immediate U.S. withdrawal and
labor strikes against the war. At the same time, as Trotskyists we hold high
the banner of permanent revolution and expose the repeated betrayals of the
Vietnamese Stalinists. Likewise we analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the
Vietnamese Trotskyists in order, in the words of the Transitional Program, “to
speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be.” Only in this
manner, by openly struggling for the program of revolutionary Marxism, can the
Fourth International be reborn.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Corrections
— from Workers Vanguard No. 21, 25
May 1973
In Part II of this series, in a
paragraph dealing with the differing fortunes of the Vietnamese Stalinists and
Trotskyists during World War II, we wrote:
“.. .the Stalinists supported the
Allies in World War II (as did Chiang Kai-shek) and were willing to make an
alliance with the Kuomintang against the Japanese. The Trotskyists, in
contrast, took the Bolshevik position of revolutionary defeatism during the
war, refusing to support any of the rival imperialist camps and their puppets.”
While the paragraph is clearly
talking of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, the sentences in question could be
misinterpreted as implying that the Fourth International as a whole took a
defeatist position in the war between China and Japan. While the FI took a
revolutionary defeatist line in the struggle between the Allied and Axis
imperialists, it did make a distinction in the Far East by supporting China
against Japan. In WV No. 4, January 1972 (“War, Revolution and
Self-Determination”) we argue that this position was correct until 1942, when
the Chinese were essentially subordinated to and integrated into the inter-imperialist
war, thereafter necessitating a position of revolutionary defeatism, while
continuing to support the right of self-determination for China. This was the
position taken by Lenin with regard to Serbian and Polish independence in the
similar situation during World War I.
The position of the Vietnamese
International Communist League gives added support to this policy. In the
specific conditions of Vietnam, where both Japanese and Chinese sought to
dominate Vietnam, a position of support for the Chinese could only have led to
a new imperialist master, as in fact occurred in North Vietnam in 1945 and
early 1946, with Ho Chi Minh acting in concert with the Kuomintang .army
instead of fighting against it. Back
In Part I we referred to the
Struggle group as the official section of the FI. It has since come to our
attention that this is only partially correct. An article from Vietnam in the
Labor Action of 27 October 1947 mentions that when the Struggle group was
recognized as the official section of the FI in 1939, the ICL fused with it. In
1945 the two groups separated once more, over profound divergences concerning
the attitude to be taken toward the Viet Minh. At that time (1945-47) the
reports on Vietnam appearing in the official organ of the International Secretariat
(Quatrième Internationale) treated both groups as Trotskyists. Back
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Letter
— from Workers Vanguard No. 23, 22
June 1973
Dear Editor,
The series “Stalinism and Trotskyism
in Vietnam,” while an important contribution to the history of this
little-known chapter of world Trotskyism, nonetheless contains certain
significant omissions. Part I of the series in WV, 27 April 1973. leaves open
to question whether the 1933 electoral bloc between the Indochinese Stalinists
and the Trotskyist group led by Ta Thu Thau (the “Struggle” group) “was simply
a no-contest pact or involved joint propaganda around a lowest common
denominator program.” I. Milton Sacks, in his article “Marxism in Vietnam” (in
F. Trager, ed.. Marxism in Southeast Asia. Stanford. 1959) states that the Ta
Thu Thau group and Indochinese Communist Party ran on a common electoral program
which “stressed mainly a series of democratic demands (right to strike, right
to form unions, voting rights, etc.) and a number of welfare measures designed
to alleviate the condition of the Vietnamese workers (lighter taxes, housing,
recreational facilities, etc.).”
Part 2 of your series ( WV, 11 May
I973) states that “Seeking to avoid any appearance of revolution, the Viet Minh
asked for and received the abdication of Bao Dai...” The Viet Minh were so
anxious to avoid “any appearance of revolution” that they actually did not ask
for the abdication of Bao Dai and were anticipating working within the
framework of the monarchy. The Stalinist “two-stage revolution” which divides
the democratic and national tasks in the colonial countries from the socialist revolution,
and proscribes a prior “democratic-national revolution” which is supposed to be
carried out in alliance with the colonial bourgeoisie, is converted in practice
into a “three-stage revolution” with a prior “progressive
aristocratic-comprador bourgeois” stage! The Stalinists in inverted fashion are
aware of the dynamic of the permanent revolution outlined by Trotsky, i.e.,
that to carry through the tasks of the democratic and national revolution the
tasks of the socialist revolution are necessarily placed on the agenda. Thus,
the Stalinists, in order to delay the socialist revolution, must also prevent
the tasks of the national and democratic revolution from being carried through.
So it was in Spain where the Stalinists prevented the expropriation and
redistribution of land; so it was in Vietnam; and so it is today in Chile. Ho
Chi Minh’s futile attempt to recrown the “progressive monarch” Bao Dai, puppet
of French and Japanese imperialism, anticipated Mao Tse-tung’s courtship of
that cast-off puppet-Prince of U.S. and French imperialism, Sihanouk, by 25
years. Bao Dai’s actual abdication was the result of a telegram sent on 21
August 1945 by a mass meeting of the Hanoi General Association of Students, in
response to a motion raised by Ho Huu Thong, leader of the Trotskyist
lndochinese Communist League.
Comradely,
Reuben Samuels
18 May 1973
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
1 Ahn-Van and Jaqueline Roussel,
Mouvements nationaux et lutte de classes au Vietnam. Paris, 1947, pp. 47-51.
Except where otherwise indicated, most of the factual information is taken from
this book.
2 Le Thanh Khoi, Le Viet-Nam, Paris,
1955, p. 448.
3 Ellen Hammer, The Struggle for
Indochina 1940-1955, Stanford, 1954, p. 92.
4 Philippe Devillers, Histoire du
Viet-Nam de 1940 à 1952, Paris, 1952, p. 69.
5 La Lutte, No. 205, 14 August 1938.
6 Hammer, op. cit., p. 92.
7 Jean Chesneaux, Contribution à
l’histoire de la nation vietnamienne, Paris, 1955, p. 230.
8 Lucien, “Quelques étapes de la
révolution au Nam-Bo du Viet-Nam,” Quatrième Internationale, September-October
1947, p. 43. Much of the factual information in this section is taken from this
article.
9 Devillers, op. cit., p. 156.
10 Lucien, op. cit., p. 45.
11 Ibid., p. 47.
12 Ibid.
13 Pierre Rousset, Le parti
communiste vietnamien, Paris, 1973, p. 26.
14 “1945: The Saigon Insurrection,”
Spartacist West No. 17, 22 August 1969. Most of the details on the September
insurrection come from this article.
15 Alan W. Cameron, ed., Viet-Nam
Crisis. A Documentary History, Vol. 1, pp. 66-67.
16 I. Milton Sacks, Nationalism and
Communism in Vietnam, unpublished dissertation, Yale University, 1960, p. 224.
17 “Les Trotskystes au Tonkin
(lettre de Hong Kong),” Quatrième Internationale, January-February 1948, pp.
71-72.
18 Quoted by Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi
Minh, New York, p. 148.
19 Chesneaux, op. cit., p. 245.
20 Harold Isaacs, No Peace for Asia,
pp. 173-174.
21 Bob Potter, “The Rape of
Vietnam,” Solidarity pamphlet, p. 9.
22 Quoted in Hammer, op. cit., p.
190.
23 Potter, op. cit., p. 9; Hammer,
op. cit., pp. 198, 200.
24 Hammer, op. cit., p. 178.
25 Chesneaux, op. cit., p. 298.
26 Ibid., pp. 297, 300.
27 Douglas Pike, Viet Cong,
Cambridge, 1966, pp. 51-52.
28 NY Times, The Pentagon Papers,
New York, 1971, p. 48.
29 Bernard Fall, ed., Ho Chi Minh on
Revolution, New York, 1967, p. 246.
30 Ibid, pp. 272-273.
31 Le Duan, On the Socialist
Revolution in Vietnam, Hanoi, 1965, Vol. I.
32 “Program of the National
Liberation Front of South Vietnam (1960),” in Bernard Fall and Marcus Raskin,
eds., The Viet-Nam Reader, New York, 1967, pp. 216-218.
33 Quoted in Wilfred Burchett,
Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerilla War, New York, 1965, p. 187.
34 Comité central, Groupe communiste
internationaliste vietnamien en France, “Nouvelle étape de la contre-révolution
et de l’offensive impérialiste en Indochine.” Quatrième Internationale,
November-December 1947, p. 64.
35 Rousset, op. cit., p. 98.
36 Ibid., p. 44.
37 Newsletter, 9 September 1969.
38 Ibid.
39 “The Vietnamese Revolution and
the Fourth International.” Fourth International, February 1968.
40 Newsletter, 9 September 1969.
